


notes in the margins

by TolkienGirl



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Conversations, F/M, Flirting, Gen, Literature, Poetry, Set early season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-13
Updated: 2019-10-13
Packaged: 2020-12-14 04:04:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21009431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: Elena loves best the conversations that mean nothing at all.





	notes in the margins

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MJosephine10](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MJosephine10/gifts).

Damon is finding a reason to appear on her doorstep, uninvited, nearly every night.

(Well. He was invited _once_.)

Conscious of Alaric’s furrowed brow and Jeremy’s eyerolls, Elena lets him come in. Once over the threshold, he reveals, with a flourish, that he’s holding a bag of groceries, or a stack of takeout containers, or (once) a bouquet of roses, behind his back.

It goes like this.

“Stefan—” and here he’ll pause, a lightning-quick question in his eyes, which means, _all clear?_

Elena will nod, a feeling rising in her heart that must be loyalty (to Stefan), and they go on.

“Stefan’s not much of a reader for reading’s sake. He was always trying to earn a point. Or a degree. Me? I just wanted to get lost. Trashy beach reads were a thing in 1910 as well as 2010, you know. The beaches were just—cleaner.”

Elena bites her tongue, thinking about _Gone with the Wind_. Damon isn’t Rhett, or Ashley—he’s like one of the bold, beautiful, stupid twins, isn’t he?

She doesn’t remember their names.

(She doesn’t know why she is thinking about this.)

Damon scours a spot off the side of the long-suffering Gilbert spaghetti pot, grins his sidelong grin. “High-school reading is a real slog these days. Dystopia instead of debauchery.”

Elena shrugs. “There’s a _little_ debauchery.”

“Oh, honestly…I’ve seen your curriculum. Don’t say _Romeo and Juliet_.”

“I just mean—” she thinks of _Vanity Fair_, which she didn’t like at all, and _Far From the Madding Crowd_, which she somehow did. “I don’t know. I’m too busy for reading, these days.” Towards the end of last year, she didn’t do any of her homework. Scraped by, somehow. Now in the midst of summer—

(Nothing matters.)

“That’s what Stefan used to say, when we had a hundred years under our belts.” Damon smiles fondly. Elena can’t remember if they were even speaking, in the 1960s. It’s hard to keep track, of their feuds and truces.

Also, Damon lies.

“How did we get started on this?”

“I saw you had a copy of_ Persuasion_ upside down on your bookshelf. Poor Jane.”

“My mom liked her.” Elena searches for an answer that will be halfway intelligent, because sure, she’s distracted, but when Damon goes all over-caffeinated literature professor, she’ll match him toe-to-toe.

(Of course, it is also very easy—too easy—to sag against the counter, let him quote poetry, let herself forget. She doesn’t have to be Elena Gilbert, very young and very old all at once. She can just be…the girl who watches Damon smile, trusting herself not to count his teeth.)

“You don’t?”

“I like westerns.”

This is something she has said to precisely no one, since her dad…well.

(Elena had a pink cowboy hat when she was six, and watched more shoot-‘em-ups on the sofa than she can remember.

Always with him.)

Damon takes the topic switch in stride. “Interesting. That why you’re so eager to ride off into the sunset?”

“Maybe.”

_Maybe I can’t afford to be a heroine, any longer._

“You’re doing Jane a disservice,” Damon tells her, seriously, then starts a fight with soap-suds.

She finds a stack of Louis L’Amour on the coffee table the next day, though. In one is a scrap of poetry—copied, she thinks.

Not original.

_You’re my favorite melodrama_

_You’re an Old West diorama_

_with the cowboys and the sunset and the hopeful, painted sign_

_in the gloaming light, my love _

_all of the pictures up above_

_are a curious and cinematic shrine _

Elena tucks a strand of hair behind her ear.


End file.
